Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, And Transnationalism

The Zeleza Post Review By Wandia Njoya

 

This latest book by Dominic Thomas joins the increasing number of works on African cultures and peoples in France written by scholars based in the United States. It seeks to establish the continuities between colonialism and immigration through African literature in French. Thomas proposes that Africans maintain a significant presence in, if not impact on, French history and identity. He argues that French cultural hegemony is challenged through the cross cultural interactions between France and its former colonies. In addition, he establishes parallels between works by African and African-American writers in order to explore what he calls “global blackness.” His hopeful view of African-French relations culminates in the conclusion that francophone African literatures “have always been symbiotically linked to French historiography” (206).

 

Thomas’ book is similar to Jules-Rosette’s Black Paris not only in title but also in structure, despite attempts in the introduction to distinguish itself from Black Paris and Odile Cazenave’s Afrique sur Seine.[1] Chapter one follows the well beaten path of French ethnology, the rise of African elites in Paris during the heyday of Senghor’s Negritude movement, as well as the convergence of the French-speaking intellectuals such as Martinican Aimé Césaire with black American writers such as Richard Wright and Claude McKay. The most significant departure of this chapter from scholarly work in the field is its cursory mention of African authors such as Alain Mabanckou and Fatou Diome who emerged in the late nineties, at a time when French politics shifted to the extreme right and immigration laws were tightened in order to shut out mainly African immigrants.

 

The second chapter returns to the colonial era in order to explore the parallels and confluences of French anthropology and early landmark novels such as Dark Child by Guinean Camara Laye, Ambiguous Adventure by Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane and An African In Paris by Ivorian Bernard Dadié. Thomas uncovers evidence of the impact of French colonial education in framing the thematic and stylistic character of these earlier works in French. He concentrates on the fascination of the protagonists with Paris as well as the authors’ attempt to challenge negative images of Africans in the French imagination and to demystify the celestial image of France. The chapter covers the familiar and uninformative terrain of negotiating insider-outsider identities that postmodern and postcolonial studies have become known for.

 

The theme of cultural fluidity extends to chapter three which focuses on the African novel as an imported genre from France, albeit with a distinct African flavor. The central fictional texts are Ousmane Sembène’s Black Docker, which Thomas juxtaposes with Richard Wright’s Native Son. Thomas’s interest here is in the ownership of textual and intellectual property, an issue which, in his view, arises in Sembène’s novel about an African man whose manuscript is stolen and published by a French woman as her own. Thomas makes the shaky argument that the question of ownership extends beyond plagiarism to social expectations of the fiction that Africans, black Americans and whites are capable of writing.

 

Chapter four examines what Thomas calls “Rhetorical Mediations of Slavery” through an analysis of an autobiography by Henriette Akofa. The chapter equates slavery in the Americas to Akofa’s exploitation in France by a Togolese relative. Thomas argues that globalization has transformed slavery from the days of the transatlantic slave trade into its present form in which African immigrants in France lured by relatives and exploited for their labor in France. Thomas’s concerted effort in the first two chapters to highlight the French hold on African cultural production is conspicuously toned down in this chapter, despite the overt patronage of Akofa’s autobiography by Richard Badinter, a French lawyer and human rights activist, as well as the collaboration of Olivier de Broca, a French writer and translator.

 

Chapter five examines “Afro-feminisms” in African fiction situated in Paris, but once again, the chapter beats a well-trod path of proposing France as a site where African women contest practices such as female circumcision. This argument is striking given Thomas’s frequent citation of various studies by Obioma Nnaemeka that question this well-known and inherently racist framework of analyzing issues confronting African women.[2]

 

Chapters six and seven focus their attention on the intersection of African youth cultures with Western consumerism and its role in whetting the appetites of young Africans who go to France. Chapter six analyzes Alain Mabanckou’s Bleu Blanc Rouge, in which Thomas unconvincingly assigns a revolutionary imperative to la sape, a Congolese form of pop culture characterized by flamboyance and ostentatious fashion, similar to the bling bling culture associated with hip hop.

 

The subsequent chapter proposes that the desire for Western consumer goods and the rise in the number of African professional footballers in France is evidence of the impact of globalization on the African youth. However, the unique nature of the impact of globalization on Africa over the last few decades remains obscure, for Thomas does not distinguish in what concrete ways the cultural impact of France in Africa differs from that of the colonial era. Such distinction is necessary, for as Prof Paul Tiyambe Zeleza asserts, Africa has always been globalized, the problem has been that its position in the global economy in the last few centuries has been that of the continent whose people are dehumanized and whose resources are voraciously exploited by Europe and America.[3]

 

In general, Black France offers little that is not already available in other scholarly work in the field. At the same time, it runs into certain theoretical obstacles. The most obvious of these is the conflation “blackness” – an ambiguous term which Thomas does not explain – with racism and the study of the issues African people confront, yet all three areas are not identical. As a result, the book’s main pitfall lies in the assumption that that analyzing race, “blackness” and colonization is the same as analyzing the issues confronting people of African descent.

 

As would be expected, a framework that examines French identity through African literature inadvertently reduces Africans’ history and experiences to the overarching framework of colonial rule. Consequently, one finds problematic statements such as the proposal that African cultural practices “serve to challenge the Western construct of Africa” (54), as if African cultures have no inherent value independent of the West, or as if African history begins at colonial rule.

 

This flaw also emerges in chapter two that analyzes Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel Ambiguous Adventure. The author sees Samba Diallo’s fate as uniquely determined by his education in the colonial school, yet Diallo’s dilemma was determined by his timid personality, his strict and brutal training in Islamic school, but most importantly, by the fact that the Diallobé aristocracy assigned him the enormous task of stemming the wane of the aristocracy’s power – a duty which he ultimately failed to carry out. The different layers of class interests among the Diallobé, which receive an excellent analysis from Samba Gadjigo, are hardly examined by Thomas.[4]

 

The fixation of Black France on people of African descent, albeit under the abstract and de-contextualized banner of “race” or “blackness,” is simultaneously accompanied by a conspicuous silence about the French Republic as a peculiar actor with specific ambitions. Thomas limits the Republic’s overt actions to colonial anthropology and administration before the 1930’s, and makes almost no mention of French politicians or government policies in post-1930 France.

 

The book is silent on Charles de Gaulle who supervised the farce of independence during the 1960’s, when he ensured that the African nationalists who were unsympathetic to France were eliminated and those who were sympathetic helped entrench France’s exploitation of Africa’s resources to this day. The failure to ground immigration in this historical context is striking, for the economic stranglehold on Africa reinforced by the Gaullist policy is the primary force behind Africans’ search to improve their fortunes in Europe.

 

A novice in the field will also be surprised to find no mention of Jean-Marie Le Pen, or better still, of Nicolas Sarkozy, two figures that had a significant impact on French politics regarding immigration. Le Pen advanced to the second round of the 2002 presidential elections on a racist platform that blamed immigrants for France’s economic woes. Under Sarkozy’s term as interior minister, France tightened its immigration policy and intensified the humiliating repatriation of Africans on charter flights.

 

In the final pages of the book, Thomas attempts to close this glaring gap by making a ceremonial mention of francafrique, the mafia-like interactions between the Champs Elysees and African presidents. The link between françafrique and immigration therefore remains tenuous in the book, despite the fact that French-African relations were the most significant cause of the civil conflicts and economic deterioration that led Africans to search for greener pastures in France and other Western countries.

 

There is glaring evidence of the connection between France’s patronage of the African political elite and the woes facing poorer immigrants in France. For instance, in 2005, Jacques Chirac promised to provide African youths with visas to France during the Africa-France summit in Bamako, Mali. This event took place barely two weeks after the riots by youths that rocked Parisian suburbs. And in an ironic twist of fact, the theme of the summit was centered on African youth as the promise of the future. Thomas fails to address this and similar manifestations of French paternalism, racism and the conflict between France’s immigration and foreign policies.

 

Instead, he attempts to reconcile two mutually exclusive concepts: the French Republic’s unique claim to universalism and its proclaimed tolerance or acceptance of African cultures and peoples.

 

The resulting absurdity emerges in this verbose and confusing statement about Diaw, the protagonist of Sembène’s novel Black Docker: “Diaw is marked as an outsider by his somatic features, but he is also a partial insider as a colonial subject, albeit one who does not enjoy the privileges of partisan citizenship” (98). In another instance, Thomas comments on Samba Diallo’s “ambiguous status” emanating from colonial rule (65). In both cases, the remarks evade the fact that colonialism had no intention to ever recognize Africans as citizens or mediators, because as far as it was concerned, Africans could only occupy the inferior position as the oppressed. Albert Memmi reiterates this point in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized that Thomas frequently cites.[5]

 

With this framework that pays limited attention to France’s imperial ambitions, the author inevitably portrays Africans as acting simultaneously as the victims and perpetrators of their own oppression. This would explain the delicate descriptions of the inferiority complex that blacks develop following their continued subjugation under racism. Thomas terms an inferiority complex as “assimilation and…mental construct of a Black…subject” (94), and castigates a character who displays such alienation for failing “to embrace his inferiority” (94).

 

Such unnerving statements are possible due to the book’s failure to render visible the presence of France as an actor in colonialism. In the absence of France, colonialism is emptied of its power, racist ideology, exploitation and physical brutality. The result is that colonialism appears as an empty shell, allowing the author to attribute the problems that Africans confront in France solely to their status as “outsiders” who theoretically possess the unfulfilled possibility of becoming citizens.

 

Another problem with Thomas’s study is its use – or misuse – of African literature. The methodological framework of Black France remains unclear, and so the reader is unable to determine for what reason fiction and an autobiography are used to examine a political and historical problem, on what criteria these texts were chosen, or whether it is even possible for French identity to be determined through African culture in the first place.

 

The study thus ignores the literary value and unique nuances of the fictional texts. Thomas imposes a literal reading of Ferdinand Oyono, the Cameroonian author famous for his satirical novels on colonial rule, and therefore misses the sarcasm of Barnabas, the protagonist of Oyono’s Chemin d’Europe (Road to Europe). He sees Barnabas’s community as placing faith in him, when in reality, Oyono bitterly mocks French colonial educators for educating Africans to aspire for the impossible and unfairly castigates poor Africans for their gullibility.

 

The convergence of the limited literary analysis and the emphasis on colonialism as the sole framework of the African experience leads to problematic theses throughout the book. For instance, the first three chapters offer too much credit to French colonial education and assimilation policies for the cultural productions of early African authors in French, leaving out the role of African traditions and the individual authors’ imagination in the writing of the novels.

 

The failure to account for the unique nature of fiction arises in chapter three, where the author makes a poorly veiled and unconvincing accusation of Ousmane Sembène for plagiarizing Native Son. Although the charge is subtly hinted and hastily withdrawn, it remains serious for an author such as Sembène who is highly respected for his rich productions in literature and film.

 

The trivialization of Sembène’s legacy is accentuated by the fact that Thomas’s observations are based on speculation about the similarities in the physical profile of the protagonists in both Sembène’s and Wright’s novels. Sembène’s novel, Black Docker, is actually centered on the theft of the Diaw’s manuscript by Ginette, a French woman author. Ginette dies from an accidental fall after she is confronted by Diaw and the latter is subsequently charged in court for her murder. Haunted by the racist stereotype of the oversexualized black man, Diaw’s fate is predictable. Thomas suggests that the similarities between Diaw and Bigger Thomas are more than just mere coincidence.

 

In so doing, Thomas effectively ignores the pervasiveness of the racist stereotype that exaggerates the physical size and sexuality of Black men, which claimed many lives in form of lynchings and still claims more in the terms of excessive prison sentences. The phenomenon in which black men are guilty not of crime, but of their perceived interactions with white women, does not require much effort – let alone plagiarism – for a writer of Sembène’s caliber to imagine.

 

Ironically, while Thomas doubts Sembène’s ability to fictionalize the manner in which Diaw’s life is negatively affected by the stereotype of the oversexualized black man, he excuses Ginette by suggesting that it was possible for her to imagine the pain of slavery that Diaw vividly describes in the manuscript that she stole: “While the court focuses on Diaw as the imposter, Ginette Tontisane cannot be excluded as the author of the text, since the narration of the voyage of a slave ship is certainly not beyond the imaginative grasp of a skilled writer” (103).

 

However, Thomas is less generous to Diaw. He calls Diaw’s authorship of the manuscript into doubt by questioning Diaw’s recitation of passage during the court trial. He observes, “one has to ask whether Diaw – or any author, for that matter – could be reasonably expected to provide an accurate rendition of his text on demand” (103). As fate would have it, Thomas’s interpretation stands as proof of the underlying theme of Black Docker, which is that Africans receive little or no credit when they produce creative work that is enjoyed by Europeans.

 

The contradictions in Thomas’s analysis of Sembène’s work point to the obscure treatment in Black France of the fluid boundaries between truth and fiction, recollection and imagination. They inadvertently imply that Sembène, and consequently African authors in general, are incapable of imagination, and particularly with regard to experiences of black Americans and even of their own. The contradictions imply that Africans’ capacities are limited to repeating the truth, while Europeans are capable of imagining the experiences of Africans and black Americans, even though those experiences stand in contradiction to their own.

 

It is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately account for the boldness with which Black France makes such controversial statements about Sembène’s work. However, I suspect that the disbelief is grounded in the fact that Diaw’s fate challenges the myth that France is “less racist” than the United States because its society tolerates intimacy between black men and white women, as opposed to the maniac and deadly responses to the same in the United States. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon provides an anecdote about this French mythology constructed around the lynching of black Americans.[6] Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute, a play based on the Scottsboro Nine, nine black American boys convicted after being falsely accused of rape by two white women, was staged before a European audience in colonial Algeria. After the play, a French military officer allegedly remarked that colonized Africans should see the play so that they can appreciate how good their conditions were compared to those of black Americans.

 

From this perspective, it seems that Black France seeks to protect the “less racist than United States” myth by proving that Sembène’s portrayal of an African man suspected of killing a white woman is an idea borrowed from black American fiction, since such an event could not have occurred in France. Such comparisons are not new. Speaking to the American press about the 2005 riots in France, then foreign minister Dominique de Villepin was careful to reiterate that the French suburbs were not the same as the American ghettos.

 

Another contentious argument can be found in chapter four of Black France. The author affirms that Africans shared equal responsibility with Europeans for the fate of their brothers and sisters enslaved abroad, which he seeks to prove by examining an account of modern slavery by a Togolese young woman lured to France and imprisoned in her relative’s house. The argument is camouflaged in ambiguous terminologies which render the lengthy citation below worthwhile:

Indeed, as Roger Botte has signaled in his essay “Le spectre de l’esclavage” (“The Specter of Slavery”), thinking on the phenomenon has, for the most part, circumvented the complexity of the phenomenon by insisting on a binary model that opposes Africa to the West (slave to master and subsequently colonized to colonizer). According to this approach, responsibility for slavery is placed almost exclusively on economic and political forces outside Africa. A paradigm that underscores the manner in which transnational economic forces work together at both local and global levels would provide a better understanding of the origins of slavery. (115)

Thomas appears to argue that the “origins of slavery” are in the exploitation of labor amongst Africans, and that Europeans simply participated in slavery for a brief period which ended cleanly with the formation of institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Committee Against Modern Slavery. These institutions allow people like Akofa freedom from their “oppression that…always originates in an African perpetrator” (118).

 

The narrative of slavery that Thomas constructs therefore emerges as follows: African slavery is a perpetual phenomenon which Europeans found in place and in which they participated for a few centuries. Once Europeans banned slavery and formed human rights organizations, Africans reverted to their previous fate of being slaves of exclusively African masters.

 

It is difficult to believe that the centuries’ long, global and commercially profitable institution of the transatlantic slave trade shares the same proportion and magnitude with exploitation of an individual young girl in France. The suggestion also ignores the institutional framework that facilitated Akofa’s exploitation: the myth of France entrenched during colonial rule, the continued exploitation of Africa by France that creates the poverty behind Africans’ readiness to surrender their children to relatives residing in France, as well as the stringent immigration laws that make Africans without valid residential documents afraid of voicing their plight to the French authorities.

 

Chapter five proves equally enigmatic. Thomas’s choice of Fatou Keïta’s Rebelle for feminist analysis rehearses the tendency of Euro-centric scholarship to reduce African women to their sexuality, while presenting France as the space for the emancipation of African women from traditional practices such as female circumcision.

 

I found this chapter doubly offensive. On the first level, it attempts to deflect attention from the sexist and racist interest that would be automatically attached to the author’s choice of Rebelle for a feminist analysis. Indeed, if one is really keen on exploring issues raised by African women writers that uniquely affect African women, Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceur du bercail would have been a more credible choice. Sow Fall’s protagonist is an African woman who travels to France to attend a conference, but who does not leave the airport because French immigration authorities arrest and repatriate her after she protests an indecent and intimate body search carried out by a male immigration official. However, Sow Fall’s novel would contradict Thomas’s thesis that France allows African women liberties that they do not enjoy in their home countries.

 

On the other level, Thomas fails to actually engage Obioma Nnaemeka’s study on the Eurocentric interest in female circumcision. In so doing, he minimizes the scholarly value of Nnaemeka’s work and reduces it to a text that merely expresses discontent with the Euro-centric preoccupation with female circumcision in Africa.

 

He entrenches this patronizing citation and subsequent trivialization of Nnaemeka’s work by accusing Nnameka of dismissing the validity of interest in female circumcision on the grounds that the majority of the scholars concerned are “outsiders.” He criticizes Nnaemeka for “firstly the assumption that ‘insiders’ act in a homogenous manner…and secondly…the implication that ‘outsiders’ are automatically at the service of postcolonial development discourse” (139-40). Despite his attempt to insulate himself from the valid concerns raised by Nnaemeka, Thomas does not succeed in deflecting the question as to why his chapter on feminism centers on a woman-authored novel that tackles the theme of female circumcision as opposed to a novel that does not.

 

Black France may be of interest to African and Africanist scholars its revelations about the methodology, theoretical framework, ideology and historical content of studies on Africans produced in the Western academy. Some of the areas that should inspire interest in this book are the apparent tussle between scholars of American and French racism to prove which country treats people of African descent “better,” as well as the rise of Francophone studies in France that makes little use of studies by African scholars in the same field.[7]

 

In addition, the pervasiveness of ambiguous terms such as “colonized subject” as a synonym for Africans, “racial signifier” or “race” as euphemisms for racism, or unexplained terms such as “transcolonialism,” lead one to associate the study with accusations of bad faith and evasion of concrete issues usually attributed to postmodern and postcolonial thought.

 

Many of the gaps in the study may have been resolved through an engagement of African literary criticism. Mohamadou Kane provides a through investigation of the presence of African traditions in the Francophone African literary imagination, which would have been useful in avoiding the pitfall of giving sole credit to colonial education for African fiction in French. Ambroise Kom provides useful insights that link the writing and publication of African literature in French on the one hand, with the history of African-French relations since the 1920’s up to the present day on the other. An engagement of his book successfully counters the tendency to limit the interaction between French imperialism and African literature to the 1930’s. An analysis of Calixthe Beyala’s embellished praise of French feminism would have been tempered with the necessary skepticism by engaging Cilas Kemedjio’s insightful article that analyzes the politics surrounding Beyala’s work. [8]

 

Due to its lack of grounding in a concrete historical context, Black France ultimately fails to establish the continuity between colonialism, immigration and transnationalism, as its title promises. It presents an Africa that is colonized by an absent colonizer and Africans as “colonized subjects” in the absence of a colonizing power. This silence on “white France” starkly contrasts Thomas’s promise at the beginning of the book to explore the challenge that African peoples pose to French identity. Black France thus replaces the unflattering history of the French Republic with a caricature – that of France in black face.

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[1] Bennnetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Afrique sur Seine: A New Generation of African Writers in Paris (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005).

[2] See, for instance, Obioma Nnaemeka, “African Women, Colonial Discourses and Imperialist Interventions: Female Circumcision as Impetus” in Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2005), 27-45.

[3] Paul Tiyambe Zeleza. Rethinking Africa’s Globalization, Vol. 1: The Intellectual Challenges. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003).

[4] Samba Gadjigo. Ecole blanche, Afrique noire, L’école coloniale dans le roman d’Afrique noire francophone (White School, Black Africa : The Colonial School in the Francophone African Novel) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990).

[5] Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon, 1991).

[6] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C.L.Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967).

[7] See Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks; Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Variations On An Anti-American Theme,” CR: The Centennial Review, 5.1 (2005), 141-178.

[8] Mohamadou Kane. Roman africain et traditions (The African Novel and Traditions) (Dakar: Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1982); Ambrois Kom, La Malédiction francophone : Défis culturels et condition postcoloniale en Afrique (The Francophone Curse : Cultural Challenges and the Postcolonial Condition in Africa) (Hamburg :LIT, 2000) ; Cilas Kemedjio, “Etre Noir/e en France : Du Quartier Latin à la départementalisation de la Siene (To Be Black In France : From the Latin Quarter to the departmentalization of the Seine),” Contemporary French Civilization 27.2 (2003) : 356-84.